Salon talks to Nancy Isenberg about America’s history of race – class – eugenics and the myth of social mobility.

Nancy Isenberg’s book ‘White Trash’ begins by looking at the characters in ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’.

Both the book and the movie play with the divide between Atticus Finch who is saintly and proper and the poor white family the Ewells – whose daughter’s false rape accusation is at the story’s center – as an example that there are two kinds of white people in the South.

The book has been on Isenberg’s curriculum for 15 years as part of a history class called ‘Crime – Conspiracy and Courtroom Dramas’ which she teaches at Louisiana State University.

From ‘Mockingbird’ Isenberg’s book travels back to the first English arrivals on the American shore – tracing four centuries of how we talk and think about class (and race) in our most unequal union.

It’s a bracing sometimes upsetting read – beginning with its name – a term which still causes deep offense in some quarters.